Mike Bird wrote: > However, metapackage equivalents of Debian tasks would have much > more reasonable numbers of dependencies - I think "desktop" is > the most complex with 18.
In the head of this thread, I posted a message listing several problems with metapackages. All of these problems may not apply to all metapackages at all times, but in sum they all apply in general and are a good reason not to use metapackages for tasks and to limit the breadth of metapackages in Debian. You have so far concentrated on how a single facet (testing propigation) of a single problem (britney scaling issues) of a single task (desktop) might not be a problem. While beating the details of an edge case to death is an interesting debating technique (or perhaps just a good way to get everyone else to go away) it's not likely to lead to anything generally useful. So far this entire thread has managed to be a useless distraction from the question at hand, which is how to make Debian's desktop task the best collection of packages it can be. I hope that if Gustavo hasn't been scared off by the predictably useless evolution of this thread so far, he will still find a way to work with me to help improve things in this area. > tasksel is a separate parallel unnecessary superfluous redundant > and largely opaque dependency lattice with some dependencies not > even determined until runtime (Test: ) and a whole set of action scripts > (postrm etc) independent of regular package scripts. Your rhetoric is boring me. "dependency lattice" has no meaning. The "Test:" fields have nothing to do with dependencies and could not be implemented using normal packages. Tasksel's sole "action script" is desktop.preinst, which could not be implemented using any regular package maintenance script or dependency mechanism, since X requires the hardware detection programs be installed before it is preconfigured. In making X operate this way, the X maintainers have *required* that the installation system have a special case for X; castigating tasksel because I chose to implement support for this special case in a generalized fashion in desktop.preinst is absurd. Please take your offtopic bullshit to /dev/null. -- see shy jo
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